


Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

by des_cieux



Category: Alien Series, Alien: Covenant
Genre: F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-11-30 01:22:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11453052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/des_cieux/pseuds/des_cieux
Summary: No sign of the Covenant's second lander, no abating of the storm.Daniels and Walter find themselves stranded on Planet 4.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Full confession to a title stolen from another homage to log cabins — Walden

 

 

“Tee! Do you read me? Tee! Are you there? **”**

 

Radio static crackles in her ear and subsides, momentarily flooding Daniels’ heart with hope. Instead of Tennessee’s voice though, all she can hear next is thunder rolling across the hellish skies, followed by the return of static. Her fingers tighten around the radio stem, fighting the urge to rip it from her hood lining and feel the snap-break of it in her grip. Interrupting the urge comes a roaring hiss, resounding from the stone entrance of the rotunda. Instantly, the inhuman yowl reminds her that the creatures which gored their way through her team are still out there. Out there and plainly more than capable of snapping every bone in her body.

 

Footsteps. At a running, urgent pace. Daniels whirls and nearly shoots Walter as he darts into the atrium. Ducking neatly, he grabs another rucksack in the same motion.

 

“Captain Oram: expired. I believe the same is true of Private Cole and Sergeant Lope. Is the second lander coming?”

 

Daniels briefly shakes her head, stops, and squints at him in the dimness.

 

“We should keep moving then and locate somewhere more secure. This level is no longer safe. Since cries came from the catacombs as well, we should avoid going below.”

 

He moves toward one of the arched corridors and then halts upon sensing her lingering behind.

 

“Daniels?”

 

She doesn’t uncurl her finger from the trigger. Her eyes scan the oh-so-familiar profile, the square jawline, the curve of his chin. The lack of the protruding nail that she had jammed into an identical chin. She barely recalls what the whole of David’s person had looked like before his visage had eclipsed her frame of vision. David had cut his hair, she loosely remembers. What she retains more sharply is how bizarre it had been to see madness etched in a face like Walter’s. Just like Walter’s. In a moment of disorientation after David had thrown her, she had wondered why Walter would hurt her.

 

“How do I know you’re not David?”

 

Anyone else, she imagines, would’ve flashed exasperation at her. Walter merely recites, “Tennessee originally planned to retain the bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey for our arrival on Origae-6. Instead, the last pour of it was given to me. During our gathering for your husband’s passing.”

 

Pain squeezes her voice to a whisper. “When in Rome.”

 

She lowers her rifle and follows him.

 

* * *

 

Up and up and up. The rotunda stairs lead them to a circular corridor, ringed by at least ten more sets of stairs. Rattling the oblong pods on the walls they’d seen David lighting below, they eventually pick the closest staircase with functioning lanterns.

 

A tower, Daniels realizes as they ascend.

 

Behind her, Walter scans the walls and spots a niche. A lever. He fiddles with it as he’d observed David doing earlier, and a stone slab slides into place, sealing them inside the tower.

 

As they reach the top, Daniels is momentarily convinced that she is stepping into a hallucination. She wants nothing more than to collapse into a bed, and the roost at the spire’s crown more closely resembles a bedroom than anything else they’ve seen.

 

Taking up most of the tiny, crammed space is a cot-like platform, its surface softened with neatly folded textiles. Next to it appears to be a crude, broken wheelchair. Jutting out from the wall is a slab with a stool tucked beneath. From among the items on the makeshift desk, the sheen of a metal plate, sloped like a vanity mirror, catches their eyes. Daniels counts three recessions carved out in the walls. One hollow more gouged out and housing blackened wood — a hearth. The other two arranged with small curios and more fabrics  — shelves.

 

Drawings encircle the room like taken-apart flipbooks. Thankfully, none of them are as anatomically horrifying as those she discovered downstairs. His eyes tracking a procession of landscapes for any identifiable matches with those in his memory module, Walter points out the ones he can discern with the most confidence.

 

Index finger tracing just outside the outline of a funny-looking tree, its stubby branches seemingly too short for its elephantine trunk, he states, “An Adansonia specimen, commonly referred to as a baobab. Native to parts of Western Asia, Australia, and mainland Africa as well as its peripheral islands. Considering the drawings closest in proximity —” His finger trails to another sketch of smoothly elongated structures. “I believe these depictions are of South Africa. This one is of the Afrikaanse Taalmonument.”

 

Daniels has never been there so she nods, taking his word for it. She recognizes the subject of another sequence of drawings all on her own though. A woman’s profile, the first rendition almost cartoonish in simplicity and each portrayal rendered increasingly precise until the last drawing presents itself as almost photographic. A face that Daniels can pinpoint as the same one in the photograph she’d found in the alien ship’s wreckage.

 

“He’s a bloody terrible artist,” Daniels mutters, sinking to perch on the edge of a dead woman’s bed.

 

Briskly, Walter sweeps the fabric out from beneath her before she can even fully sit down. “If we’ve learned anything on this expedition, the need for methodical examination of possible contagions is paramount.”

 

“Of course,” she murmurs before adding in vexation, “Walter, is there any point to checking now? For all I know, I could’ve been infected by any number of contagions as we made our way here.”

 

And for all she knows, the crew aboard the _Covenant_ was not sending out a second lander to retrieve them after all. Perhaps, they’d reviewed the footage of her conversation with the pilots and her report of the disastrous landing only to decide that sending another team would be too dangerous. Tennessee would argue against such abandonment. She believes wholeheartedly that he would rescue them himself if he could, but would he act like Oram had and descend against the wishes and advice of other crew members?

 

A hand pulls at her sleeve, curbing her from kneading further in frustration at her temples.

 

“You might as well rest,” Walter says softly. “I’m fairly certain we secured access to this area, but for full assurance, I shall remain on guard.”

 

“What about you? Does your skin — will you self-repair more quickly if you rest too?”

 

“Any change in rate of repair would be infinitesimal at best. Rest, and hopefully, we will see clearer skies when you awake.”

 

“Walter  — is David, is he definitely  — “

 

“Expired? What I last saw of him...” He looks down at his acid-cauterized wrist. “I cannot exactly claim credit, but perhaps David himself would have regarded it as a fitting end. He seemed to....enjoy the concept at least of children extinguishing their fathers.”

 

Instinctively, Daniels winces, and then her features harden. She will not, refuses to, feel anything approaching compassion for that madman. “Bastard deserved what he got.”

 

But Walter had called that bastard “brother,” not exactly with emotion but not quite without meaning either. Expelling a sigh, Daniels tells him honestly, “I hate him, Walter. What I saw in those drawings downstairs...I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a more twisted being in my life.”

 

“Honesty in expression is cathartic.” It rolls off his tongue without prior calculation of which remark would most likely bring comfort to Daniels. But it sounds like something David would say.

 

Daniels has turned around without commenting on it though, already in the process of removing her suit and her boots. Moisture, dirt, and blood darken patches of her suit, and she again swallows down the seeming futility of resisting contamination on this world. However, it simply feels better, cleaner, to climb into the bed in just her tank top and shorts. Against her bared skin, the linens settle, surprisingly soft. The fold pressed against her nose smells, well, not machine-washed, but clean — a subtle scent, plant fibers, not like wool, not like the extra angora socks Jacob had bundled in their pockets for their Icelandic trek  —

 

“Walter,” she murmurs, lids half-closed and sliding further down. “Sit down, will you? If not for your comfort, then for mine?”

 

She perceives him gingerly situating himself on the wheelchair, missing a wheel, and his even gaze alternates between her and the stairs as she slips into darkness and sleep.

 

* * *

 

Daniels isn’t sleeping well.

 

Walter observes this status several times and reframes the parameters of her directive for him to sit. A more peaceful rest would enhance her comfort more than his sitting, and thus, he rises to dim the lanterns. He’s not sure how long they will have to wait here — David had said the storms on this world could last months — and conservation of energy is invariably important anyway.

 

Daniels still shudders against her improvised pillow though, and after the third hour of his watch, Walter skims the pads of his fingers along the arch of her eyebrow while brushing away a lock of dark hair. It had felt good when he had performed the same action earlier. Now, the delicacy of the contact feels even better.

 

Incomprehensibly, it is his neck that tickles, tingles.

 

Honesty in expression is cathartic, and if he is honest, he wants to touch her more.

 

Walter retracts his hand and claps it around the side of his neck where David had stabbed him.

 

Concentrating his attention away from that lock of hair, away from Daniels’ cheek and lips parted by breath and the steady rise-fall of blankets he’d checked and rechecked for contamination, Walter stares at the drawings of another woman’s face and wonders at his own corruption.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

_“Hey Walter, think you can sniff out some truffles?”_

 

_“Or at least something not poisonous,” carps another disgruntled colonist, holding up a snarl of taproots resembling spoiled turnips._

 

_“He’s not a dog.” Daniels speaks up when Walter doesn’t. Instead, he’s scrutinizing the loam soil beneath their boots, his eyes already engaged in thoughtful analysis._

 

_“It was his job to get us here,” Daniels continues. “He did his job. Now, it’s time for us to do ours so keep that tractor moving, and we can clear out the deadwood by sundown.”_

 

_She’s in the midst of re-attaching a grease fitting to a second tractor’s bearing when Walter comes up to her, his hands cupped as if holding something precious._

 

_“Cahill said he wanted mushrooms, yes?”_

 

_“What? Hold on, Walter.” Daniels pulls back the protective headgear that was muffling the noise of nearby drilling. Walter’s voice sounded strange, like he was speaking out of an old film._

 

_“Oh, Walter, you really don’t have to take every comment so seriously.”_

 

_He’s still proffering forth his finding, and she’s never doubted his judgment before, but the oblong black bulbs in his hands look unappealing. Inedible. She can’t even tell if the bulbs are fungi, a kind of plant form, or some strange type of egg that nature has shaped to take on a more botanical appearance._

 

 _“I would prefer for the botanists to take a more thorough look at the local flora before we start mixing these into salads.” Daniels tries to smile, despite the smell of those_ things _— she’s going to hedge her bets toward the guess of eggs now — rotten ones. Walter offers her his own beatific smile. Strange, he never had the easiest time smiling, but his attempts at easing the solemnity of his hard jawline were endearing. This smile was just — odd._

 

_She gets caught up in other tasks after that — helping with the deadwood’s clearing and measuring the phosphorus index of the topsoil. As nightfall halts the work, she’s pulling off her gloves when Walter comes up to her again. The eggs in his hands seem to ooze, and the reek smells even more potent than before._

 

_She’s about to shrug him off — they have enough rations to last them a good long while before they would have to sample Origae-6’s vegetation — when he says, “Really Elizabeth, you can’t go on like this. I must insist you eat something.”_

 

_Daniels takes a step back, her shoulder hitting the open trunk of the truck behind her and her left hand reaching back for the welcome feel of a rifle stock. “What did you call me?”_

 

_David tilts his head, appearing puzzled himself. “Oh, I apologize. I do seem to be mixing up names quite a lot recently.”_

 

 _His smile is tight, but his grip around the black bulbs squeezes even tighter, and they release a vapor made partially visible by_ something _twisting in it, and she can’t do anything because it’s already reached her, burrowed its way inside of her, oh she can feel it_ squirm _—_

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Daniels."

 

"Daniels! Are you alright?”

 

Walter. It’s Walter holding her by the right forearm. Her fist is still curled to draw blood, and her eyes trace the scratches on her left arm.

 

He’s positioned so very close to her, Daniels realizes, and she takes the opportunity to search his face for any features distinguishing him from David. As if to help her on cue, Walter smiles, awkwardly, but it’s all him.

 

“Perhaps, I should not envy the ability to dream after all.”

 

She lets out a shaky chuckle and shifts away from him to stand on her own feet. The lack of windows makes it impossible to tell if it’s morning or night on this planet — or if this world has an analogue to solar time at all.

 

“You can feel envy, Walter?” she asks as she pulls on her suit.

 

A pause as he mulls over her question. “I misspoke. I suppose the more accurate word would have been 'curiosity'.”

 

He treads to one of the cavities in the walls. “I admit I’m curious about something else. You called my name while you were dreaming. Was I in your dream?”

 

“Oh, it’s already kind of hazy what the dream was about, but what I do remember is…”

 

When she finishes recounting her dream to him, he is silent for a longer stretch.

 

“I would never offer shrooms to you,” he says at last, completely deadpan. “Even if you demanded them, I think I would refuse. They’re highly hallucinogenic.”

 

She grins. “What happened to the Walter that brought me a choice selection of carefully hand-rolled joints?”

 

“Cannabis,” Walter responds with conviction. “Has rigorously corroborated pharmacologic benefits. The Weyland School of Medicine’s reaffirming study in 2090 cites and is cited by hundreds of authorities.”

 

Shrugging, Daniels can’t resist the chance to further tease his rationalizing use of statistics. “Probably some Weyland-Yutani pothead exec who funded that study.”

 

“But there exist many more studies — “

 

“More suspicious funding.”

 

“What happened to your trust in science?” He sounds genuinely alarmed.

 

“Hmm." She joins him at the cranny where he’s busying himself with coaxing a set of gears fixed inside the nook. "Walter, what are you doing?” 

 

“The open air configuration has rusted from disuse, but — hold on — "

 

From above groans the shifting of stone and metal parts. She watches as the ceiling panels make a quarter rotation, opening like a camera’s aperture to reveal a polygonally-framed glimpse of slate gray, thundercloud-embroiled sky. Through the opening gushes an instant torrent of rain — right into the wide-rimmed tureen Walter has placed in the room’s center.

 

She still cannot decipher if it is day or night.

 

“David mentioned the average duration of storms here?”

 

“Yes, but he had not observed predictable durations. Just variations from hours to days to months.”

 

She reaches into the cranny, her hand alongside his, to move the gears. The improvised bucket is filling up fast with water. Above them, the ceiling panels shift closed again.

 

“Do you think David was lying about the possibility of months?”

 

“I don’t perceive why he would've lied about that.”

 

Because David’s a colossal dick. She leans against the walls, worrying her parched lips with the edge of her teeth.

 

Walter’s gaze flickers down to her mouth. “We could see if there’s a more efficient way of collecting the rainwater.”

 

“You mean, leave this room?”

 

“Auditory and other processing has registered no other lifeforms in the corridor below us. And we sealed the stairs on that level as well.”

 

“Well, since the goal is to leave eventually, we might as well practice our grand escape.”

 

* * *

 

It’s cumbersome, but they take the precaution of suiting up with weapons  — Daniels with a pulse rifle and Walter with a laser pistol in his good hand  — as they venture out of the room. Two arched entryways from their tower is another spire, accommodating a system of chutes arranged in alternating fashion to the top of the walls. They find the gears that open up this tower’s ceiling, and rain droplets pellet down, bullet-like, into the highest placed chute. They angle their faces to watch as the water flows smoothly from chute to chute, gradually collecting in a stone basin. Daniels isn’t sure if the intended purpose of the basin is for bathing, but she estimates she could fully lie down for a soak in the structure.

 

In a corner of the tower, they uncover two domed contraptions and prod with cautious hands. She’d only watched that ancient film, _A New Hope_ , once, but the appliances look like Artoo to her, and Daniels half-expects them to start beeping indignantly as she pokes at button-like protrusions.

 

Another water collection machine, she figures out as a slot pops out, proffering water.

 

They both sniff at it, and Walter eventually takes a sip with a look of such concentration that he resembles a famous food critic on an old show she remembers her mother watching.

 

“The pH level is 7.5,” he pronounces at last. “Perfectly safe.”

 

She takes a swig from the same container, and the water tastes clean and sweet on her tongue.

 

They fill their canteen bottles with the water and later return with urns to gather more reserves as well.

 

* * *

 

“I suppose this answers some of our questions about the wheat,” Walter remarks, fingers sifting through the sack of grains.

 

A third tower starts flickering alight for them on the seventh day, seventh according to Walter's tracking of solar time at least. Their territory expands, incrementally, much to Daniels’ relief since they’re down to the two candy bars and square pack of freeze-dried ice cream that Cole, the apparent sugar fiend, had stored in his backpack.

 

Inside the third tower, they discover stores of grain next to an oven and a chimney ready to waft smoke out of the turret’s ceiling.

 

“Not really,” Daniels counters, frowning. “Chicken or the egg problem. Which came first? Was it cultivated before David and Shaw arrived? It’s pretty clear those two, one of those two at least, harvested it, but the _Prometheus_ wasn’t a colonization ship like ours. Doubt they would have bothered carrying seeds aboard. What do you think is more probable?”

 

For once, Walter does not roll out an encyclopedic explanation, but rather, poses a question back in response. “Have you seen the ceiling painting? In the room we rest in?”

 

“The figure, with hands reaching toward those spheres?”

 

“Yes. The publicized objective of the _Prometheus_ was to test the theses of Doctors Shaw and Holloway. They had found paintings around the world that led them to believe that humanity’s creators had traveled the stars, the galaxies, sowing life where they found it suitable. Perhaps, these grand architects...led their creations to cultivate strains of wheat in several worlds.”

 

Walter quirks a smile at her. “Your predecessors in terraformation, if you believe that.”

 

His hand returns to rotating the pestle, to grinding the grain to powder. It’s slow work, and he’s not the one who has to eat, but he’s told her repeatedly, without resentment, that he doesn’t mind.

 

When they at last produce a small flatbread from the oven, he watches Daniels bring a morsel to her mouth.

 

“Not bad,” she remarks.

 

“Not bad usually means it doesn’t taste satisfying.”

 

“That’s harsh, Walter!” she declares in mock-offense before breaking off another morsel and waving it in his direction. “Besides, how can you give an accurate assessment of the taste if you haven’t tried it?”

 

“We have limited supplies as it is. You don’t have to waste — “

 

She knows he has rapid reflexes, but either he doesn’t perceive her gestures as threatening or he’s really struggling to process whether the flatbread qualifies as “not bad” because she manages to slip the morsel into his mouth, and he lets her two fingers remain there, against the wet stroke of his tongue.

 

Internally, she tries to laugh it off at first. What else would she expect to find in a synthetic so advanced — a mouth of metal? But the lush, slick warmth of his tongue is — unexpected.

 

He doesn’t have a protocol for this. Crew members used to touch him all the time — a clap on the shoulders, a lean against his frame during moments of voyaging turmoil — but this point of contact is one he instinctively registers as different. At a loss for a frame of reference, he can only compare this to brushing away that stubborn lock of her hair. It felt good when her fingertips touched his lips. It feels even better when she doesn’t pull away as he seals his mouth in suction around the pad of her thumb. He doesn’t recall how the morsel tasted, but he tastes sugar and salt and flour on her skin, and he doesn’t think it could have tasted better anyway.

 

In withdrawing, Daniels traces a glisten of his own wet lick onto his lip, to the dip of his chin.

 

* * *

 

 

She can’t quite look him in the eye for the rest of the day, and he can’t stop looking her way.

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which I Xenomorph-rip my way through depressing canon and prove how trashy I am at writing smut

 

 

For both of them, the first few hours after awaking — well, Daniels’ awakening — are easier. Going from the radio to the laptop to the adjustable opening in the ceiling, they check and test each for any sign of a less hostile world. Walter recognizes neither hope nor disappointment in himself, but he does not enjoy witnessing how the starshine of Daniels’ eyes first brighten with eagerness and then succumb to the reality of another torrential day.

 

There’s more than enough water to drink and clean with and...play in. When Daniels showers, she does so alone, quickly and efficiently stepping in and out of the other tower’s basin. But once or twice, they weather the trickle-by of time by stripping down to t-shirt and tank top and reclining back against the stone concavity. Gradually, water, from the overhead chutes, collects to lap at their waists and immerse them in a soak.

 

Her parents, she tells him, took her to a hot spring resort once, a vacation and by-then environmentally rare luxury they’d anticipated for weeks. She on the other hand, had pouted, simultaneously too restless and too bored to simply sit still in the constrained circumferences of rock-bordered pools.

 

“I found this other kid my age eventually,” she recalls. “We had this sprawling splash war and probably terrorized all the adults around us.”

 

“Splash war?” Walter’s English vocabulary includes well over 80,000 words. Humans however, he’s realized, fluidly string words together all the time to create their figures of speech — analogies and idioms and jokes. Of course, his neural capacity allows him to infer meanings from context clues, but he’s always found illustrations to be helpful.

 

“Oh you know,” Daniels says, her tone nonchalant but her eyes speaking of mischief. “Like this.”

 

With a motion almost as fast as a synth’s, her arm sweeps across the water in an arc, and Walter’s visual processing is briefly interrupted by the cresting splash.

 

He blinks, and across from him, Daniels is crouched, her lean arms positioned as if to douse him again.

 

Arms lowering, she tilts her head when he doesn’t move a muscle. “Hey...did it get in your eyes? I’m sorry for catching you off guard — ”

 

She’s cut off by his try at a splash, and she jumps back with a sound of surprised delight as the water plasters her tank to her skin. Grinning as she glances at the mini-flood sprayed out of the basin, she leans over to playfully swipe at his shoulder. “I don’t think there’s enough water left in here for me to splash you back, but I’ll return the favor next time.”

 

Daniels is smiling so he smiles back, as best as he can. As she straightens to wring out the bottom of her tank, his gaze falls to the gentle dips and smooth planes of skin exposed. Rivulets of water run parallel to the toned line of her abdomen before sliding past the band of her underwear to the lower cradle of her hips.

 

Even for a non-sculptor unit with as little sense of aesthetics as him, Walter registers her as beautiful.

 

* * *

 

Sleeping, eating, drinking. For these most essential human needs, they develop routines. But what Daniels seems to require the most from him now is interaction and stimulation. The more spontaneous, the more it seems to draw out smiles and laughs from her. He’s never before had reason to doubt his function as a companion, but during stretches of quiet, he wonders if a synth from the David series would keep Daniels in better company.

 

“Wanna know my hypothesis?” she asks in the midst of fiddling with the hologram projector they found in the shelves. A miniature cousin of the device that emitted Elizabeth Shaw’s last song. So far, the projector is the most advanced piece of technology they’ve laid their hands on in these rooms.

 

It was exciting, initially, to swivel the sphere on the stand and watch as the blue holograms morphed. Daniels hasn’t deciphered a word of what the spectral figures are saying though, and the memory databanks of Walter’s dialectic implant provide no aid in interpretation. No living human would have required his or her Walter model to converse in even the archaic languages stemming from this alien tongue, and thus, he’s found himself equally as unequipped in translating whatever wisdom might be preserved within the projector.

 

Nonetheless, Daniels occasionally turns the device on, out of boredom and the urge to pin down some meaning in the remnants of civilization left on this world.

 

“Maybe David’s conclusion — that he won some kind of fucked-up victory against this planet’s entire population — was premature.”

 

She charts her index finger across the illuminated recording. “You notice how these taller figures seem to be wearing armor? I’m thinking they might represent a different class or group than these individuals in the robes. Or maybe, they’re a different species altogether.”

 

“Or perhaps they’re just taller.”

 

“Yeah. I guess. It’s just…” She rotates the sphere again, replaying the same sequence of some kind of ceremony. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that a species so advanced they could travel from here to Earth millennia ago also relied on such cruder instruments and lived in a world that resembles our antiquity?”

 

“So you believe in Dr. Shaw’s thesis now?”

 

“Well we’re standing amidst the evidence, aren’t we?”

 

“Another explanation,” Walter points out. “Could be that we’re in one of their smaller, less developed cities, and the grander capitals that built the ship we saw are just located somewhere else on this planet.”

 

“Or…” Daniels counters. “The grand capitals aren’t on this planet at all. Maybe the epicenter is elsewhere while this whole planet is just a settlement on the sidelines, an outpost, like Earth. They received some of the creators’ gifts — the ships, the holograms, the portable technologies — but in other areas, they clearly lived more plainly.”

 

“Could they not have merely preferred simplicity in lifestyle — like Thoreau in his log cabin?”

 

Daniels smiles softly at that. She’s not an archaeologist or aficionado when it comes to theorizing about the grander schemes of the cosmos. But these are the questions that the crew of the _Prometheus_ , and Elizabeth Shaw in particular, died trying to answer, and Daniels now has nothing but time to contemplate what they were trying to find.

 

Reshelving the device, she looks as adrift as she once appeared in the aching wake of Jacob's death.

 

“I guess I’ve just grown tired of sad endings.”

 

* * *

 

She’s restless with dissatisfaction of how restrained motion is in here. Daily, she runs through the stretches and exercises she can actually execute in the confined space. Planks, planche pushups, pike positions against the walls.

 

She rolls backwards, legs lifting into the air and folding smoothly with momentum until her toes nearly touch the ground above her head. A modified Halasana plow posture so that with a forceful push, she swings next into a handstand. From between the frame of her arms, she can see Walter looking quizzically at her. Keeping active, he knows, can serve as a productive approach to enduring stressful situations; nonetheless, her choice of such contorted positions makes him curious.

 

“Do you...enjoy that?”

 

Smiling upside down at him, she drops her legs back down to stand up straight. “Have you ever heard of this old book called _The Stars My Destination_?”

 

“Yes. I’m also aware of its even older predecessor, _The Count of Monte Cristo_.”

 

“That’s what I’m aiming for then,” she quips, her inflection at first facetious. “An epic self-transformation of mind and body so when we leave this place, I'm ready to take on anything.” Whenever she mentions leaving, her voice is edged with conviction. She has to believe they will leave this entombment and this planet altogether. She has to.

 

Back in plank position, Daniels lowers her body while checking the approximate forty-five degree bend of her elbows. “Wanna join?”

 

He studies her form for another second before arranging himself next to her. His pushups turn out perfect. All seventy-five reps of them in one go. Rolling over to lie on her back as Walter keeps going, she catches herself admiring the muscle definition in his arms. He doesn’t react and wink at her like some guys would at a gym. Instead, he simply readjusts the placement of his hands, his countenance remaining steady and borderline-stern as if she’s a drill sergeant and he’s a cadet under her inspection. She wonders if he even has a perspiration mode.

 

It’s a better workout than she’s had in a while. Despite the exercise though, she finds herself, hours later, nowhere near tired enough to sleep.

 

His back hunched in a posture unusual for him, Walter recharges in the wheelchair next to the bed. According to his diagnostics, he’d told her, he was due for a checkup of his biometric regulation systems. She’d offered him the cot consistently, and he’d replied just as constantly with soldierly discipline that he could serve as a more prepared guardian in the chair.

 

After a solid two minutes of observing not even a breath from Walter’s inert form, she decides. It’s just a quicker way to fall asleep.

 

Beneath the blankets, her hand slides past the elastic of her shorts, her underwear.

 

She strokes briskly, impatient for languor to flare and wash over her trembling thighs. Parting her seam, she runs her fingertips faster where she’s most sensitive. Increasing the friction, she presses down, seeking to crest, to crest —

 

Concurrently, two developments snag her attention. The first: Walter has seized her blanket-wrapped wrist, and she can’t even fully react with mortification because of the second.

 

From outside the tower portal, something _rasps_ , the high-pitched hiss unmistakable to anyone who’s heard it. Who’s been hunted by it.

 

Her immediate instinct is to kick off the blankets and snatch up the pulse rifle next to the bunk, but before she can even wholly sit up, Walter jostles her back down to the bed.

 

“What —” she mouths furiously at him.

 

To her confusion, he slides off the wheelchair and noiselessly slants, bears his body over and down to mantle hers.

 

For a suffocating moment, the remembrance of David, pinning her down with the unyielding strength of cadmium alloy, flashes over Daniels’ eyes. Within her rises the compulsion to shove at the body weighing hers down and snarl, but the predator outside, somewhere in the short span of stairs between their door and the lower corridor, beats her to it, releasing a much more dread-inducing growl. Gooseflesh prickles her arms, and her faint layer of sweat feels cold against her skin. Magnifying her bewilderment, Walter lowers his head and brings his lips very, very close to her ear.

 

Daniels barely hears him over the quickening thrum of her own heart.

 

“It senses through scent.”

 

Her startled eyes dart between his completely sincere face and the portal. A boulder-like stone door has never seemed so flimsy.

 

His hips thrust down, melding their bodies closer, and she finds her nose pressed against the base of his neck. The sudden proximity reminds her that Walter doesn’t smell of anything. His shirt collar whiffs of the flatbread they baked earlier, but his polyurethane-coated imitation of skin has no scent at all.

 

Daniels tries to regulate the volume, the rate, of her inhales and exhales against his neck, tries to reduce her breath to as noiseless as his.

 

But Walter lifts her hand, still slick between two fingers, and seals his mouth around her fingertips. Daniels can feel the warm tactility of his tongue lick and suck, and sure, he’s collecting her moisture and scent off her fingers, but she tries hard to not wriggle against him as new wetness gathers between her legs. Willing herself to not move, to become like stone, to think of anything else, she stares at Walter and pretends he’s David instead.

 

She is stone. She is stone. She is the sepulchre of someone forgotten and fossilized, and the claws rasping on the other side cannot savage her again.

 

The bestial shriek recedes. She counts to sixty once. Then again. And once more. Daniels has spent some spell between eternity and a good half hour memorizing the look of intense concentration on Walter’s face by the time he finally whispers, “I believe it’s —”

 

Her free hand wrenches his grip off. Fueled by the heady intoxication of having just escaped death and a more basic form of release from grounded reality, she guides his hand down to brush against the juncture of her thighs.

 

For a brief strain of heartbeats, he just stares at her, his deliberation as suspended and unsure as his hand. And then — a caress gentling along the already wet seam of her. Again.

 

Unbidden, the memory of her form under David’s arises, freezing Walter’s hand anew. Like David, he knows exactly which muscles are pulsing under his touch. But. The finer points of time and pressure elude. What David had related to Daniels. And David had hurt her. Walter isn’t sure if he houses any components designed for tenderness either. Certainly, the dermis of his body has texture indistinguishable from that of human skin, but underneath, he’s all corrosion-resistant, metal rigidity. More than capable, as David had proved, of hurting Daniels. Especially here, where she flushes with heat and her grooved, moist flesh parts for him.

 

But cadmium is malleable, and he's also…disposed to act when she asks him to. Her grip is no longer one of pulling direction. Rather, she thumbs small rotations on his palm as she waits for him to accept or decline the invitation.

 

He moves. Smoothing out a pressure-metered rhythm on her cleft. On and then inside the swelling, lubricating flesh.

 

His eyes remain fixated on her face as he studies every facial muscle quiver for what draws the strongest reactions from her. At one point, he opens his mouth, prepared to apologize if she’s experiencing any deficiencies and to explain that he was configured quite differently from the romantic unit of his series. Reflexively, she bucks against his hips, and the compulsion to deliver any explanation is wiped out by her mouth against his.  

 

Below his frame, Daniels shifts, and the new point of contact answers a question about his anatomy she would’ve never dared to ask.

 

She doesn’t know if David’s damned demons hear through actual ear canals or echolocation so as she comes, she manages to only just muffle her gasp against Walter’s shoulder.

 

And when she’s done at last shaking against him, the room is indeed as cold and silent as any sepulchre by the sea.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That ol' horror-movie tradition of women meeting imminent death right after they're engaged in sexual activity? Yeah, fuck that. 
> 
> But sincerely, I apologize for ruining Xenomorph encounters for you forever if you've read up to this point.


End file.
